I create large-scale mixed media individual works and installations utilizing woodblock printing, screenprinting, collage, and painting on primarily upcycled materials. The process typically begins with hand carving large-scale woodblocks as large as four by eight feet in scale; using imagery pulled from a variety of personal and historical sources – the iconography of past and present empires, camouflage, textile patterns, logos, biological charting, military graphics, and universal symbols. These woodcuts are then inked and hand-rubbed onto a translucent film, transferred to silkscreen, and screen-printed onto canvas and upcycled materials. My work is a response to globalization’s dual nature as a force for both prosperity and destruction. The work represents the complex social, religious, economic, health, environmental, and political interdependence of the contemporary world. These ideas are expressed through the layering of marks, symbols, patterns, and the building of imagery that draws parallels between the past and the present. Creating these large, handmade and multilayered sets of images, I use printmaking techniques as a painter would; a way to make marks in the same way one uses a brush. The resulting images are both representational and abstract while revolving around the interconnected issues of poverty, war, racism, consumerism, exploitation, and the conservation of nature and culture. My process is fast paced, repetitive, intuitive, and blurs the lines between painting and printmaking. I’m a proud labourist, executing each piece from start to finish in a way that can take as much as a year or more to complete. The rhythmic/meditative nature of the task, along with handling the physical materials and the need to make intuitive decisions as I worked, brought both an intentional, spontaneous quality to a body of work. I also found that working with an unpredictable natural material such as wood, while using a nontraditional approach to carving, leaves room for the element of chance in the work.